I'm new to Linux as of the last few months and am confused on something basic with regard to package installation.

I'm working on a Debian distro, and have seen some install files that use "apt-get" to install various packages.

What's unclear to me is where these packages are coming from. Two questions:

1) How does the server know where to get the packages if there's no server path or www address in the apt-get command line?

2) Do Linux distros typically come with "dormant" packages that need to be enabled with "apt-get" or are packages usually obtained from an external distribution site?

malekmustaq

11-05-2012 11:44 AM

Quote:

What's unclear to me is where these packages are coming from. Two questions:

1) How does the server know where to get the packages if there's no server path or www address in the apt-get command line?

The server paths are within list of sources kept in /etc as dpkg /apt-get record. The command has its own record.

Quote:

2) Do Linux distros typically come with "dormant" packages that need to be enabled with "apt-get" or are packages usually obtained from an external distribution site?

Some distros have complete set of installable packages on the installer DVD (e.g. Slackware DVD installer) and some don't have (e.g. Mint CD) this latter relies merely on the internet connection to download and install whatever you apt-get in the command line.

I'm new to Linux as of the last few months and am confused on something basic with regard to package installation.

I'm working on a Debian distro, and have seen some install files that use "apt-get" to install various packages.

What's unclear to me is where these packages are coming from. Two questions:

1) How does the server know where to get the packages if there's no server path or www address in the apt-get command line?

2) Do Linux distros typically come with "dormant" packages that need to be enabled with "apt-get" or are packages usually obtained from an external distribution site?

1) Look in the file /etc/apt/sources.list (and sometimes additional files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d) to see where your packages are coming from. Also for any given package you can: apt-cache policy mypackage

2) Debian gives you your choice, you can either perform a "netinstall" (fetching all packages from the internet during install) or download a complete CD/DVD library of all packages in the repository for offline installation.